If you're absolutely, positive dying for some excuse to do this (i.e. I don't currently have the budget to pay you anything to do it), I work in a manufacturing environment where we are using a postgresql database to store bills of materials for parts. One of the things we also have to do is to figure out is what combination parts cut out of a piece of sheet metal will waste the least amount of material--your standard nesting problem. It would be useful to have the ability to use a single computer to store all the part dimensions in the database using the various postgres geometry stuff (which we're not currently doing) and then be able to flingin brute force fashion zillions of shapes at the GPU in all different orientations to get the best combination of bills of materials that would use the least amount of metal.
Aren't you sorry you asked? ;)
-- Ilan
On Jun 8, 2007, at 1:26 PM, Billings, John wrote:
Does anyone think that PostgreSQL could benefit from using the video card as a parallel computing device? I'm working on a project using Nvidia's CUDA with an 8800 series video card to handle non-graphical algorithms. I'm curious if anyone thinks that this technology could be used to speed up a database? If so which part of the database, and what kind of parallel algorithms would be used?
Thanks,
-- John Billings
Ilan Volow
"Implicit code is inherently evil, and here's the reason why:"